Robert Hayden's poem "Those Winter Sundays" serves as the anchor text in a five-part activity that takes the mystery out of poetry analysis by modeling explicit strategies for pupils to employ to conduct a close reading of a poem. After...

Contemporaneously known as The Great War, World War I had never seen its match on the global stage—until World War II. An engaging set of resources designed to extend a viewing of the History Channel's The World Wars features discussion...

Capitalism, socialism, communism ... these may seem like a whole bunch of isms to your scholars. High schoolers won't  confuse them after completing an informative resource. Your class masters how to use primary sources to critically...

How do poets convey emotion and represent their views of life? Pupils learn more about Whitman and Dickinson through the unit and analyze their bold reinvention of craft and style for poets to come. Looking at classic pieces such as...

Encourage readers to determine if Hamlet's madness is actually divinest sense. Class members analyze the words of the play before studying related texts, including T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," scenes from...

What responsibility do we have to protect the privacy and safety of others when posting information about them online? This is an essential lesson for every learner today experiencing their social and professional worlds in an online...

While often used interchangeably, the distinction between accuracy and precision is critical for many scientific endeavors. Discover the importance of consistency for precise results, and the need for accuracy in the field of research,...

Disguises and role playing are the focus of a resource that uses Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Henry IV, Part I, to demonstrate how we all play many parts in our lives; how we all are “merely players.” The many...

Approach ethical online behavior with a series of activities geared toward teaching pupils about digital citizenship. After a brief discussion about ethics, small groups inspect a fictional social networking profile with ethics in mind....

Martin Luther King Jr's " I Have a Dream" speech and Atticus Finch's closing argument during the trial of Tom Robinson both address the societal need to overcome racism. After examining the rhetorical devices and figurative language used...

What makes heroes and villains? A six-part unit plan asks young scholars to explore the concept of heroism and the characteristics they consider heroic and unheroic. Groups create character maps that focus on how characters are shaped by...

C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia is about far more than the adventures of a group of children in an imaginary kingdom. Find out what else it's about in a short Great American Read video.

Looking for Alaska is the subject of a short PBS video that encourages viewers to read John Green's award-winning young adult novel about first love. 

Published in 1813 and considered by many to be the first romance novel, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice still tops the chart as a favorite read. Literary experts share why the tale of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy continues to win the...

Believe it or not, there is a group of Jane Austen fans who call themselves Janeites and gather each year to celebrate all things Austen, dancing, and dressing in period-authentic clothing. In this video, one devoted fan shares her...

Is it hubris that drives the creative process? Is it the desire to be remembered long past death? An interactive asks readers of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein and Percy Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" to consider what this wife and...

Douglas Adams' hysterical send-up of bureaucratic thinking, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is the focus of a Great American Read video that urges viewers to vote for one of the greatest satires since Gulliver's Travels.

Rather than windmills, Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces, battles against modernity. Find out why Professor Walter Isaacson thinks Toole's novel should get viewers' votes...

"Sweet Speech," the vernacular of southern blacks that Zora Neale Hurston captures in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is the subject of a resource from the PBS American Masters series. An anthropologist, Hurston drew on her...

If you really want to know, this is a terrific lesson all about narratives, which is just a fancy way of saying telling stories. And you get to do it without being phony or anything. My favorite part is that you get to read a passage...

An interactive provides readers with an opportunity to record their reactions to Beloved, Toni Morrison's powerful narrative based on the life of Margaret Garner. Prompts ask them to consider how the shifting point of view contributes to...

Readers of Toni Morrison's Beloved share their reasons for why the painful and powerful narrative should be on the list of books for the Great American Read program.

Ready Player One has been praised as a novel that captures the vitality, the allure, and the essence of the virtual reality experience. Speakers in a short video share their rationale for why Ernest Clines' dystopian novel should be...

Reverend Katrina Foster offers her rationale for why Winston Smith, the tragic hero of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, is her favorite literary character.